Why couldn’t Michael “Hero Shot” Bay for once stop with his usual craptastic shit and go for quality, heh? It’s not that this installment of the Transformers franchise is godawful as some reviewers think. In the end it’s the usual action packed stuff you love or hate, so there’s nothing wrong with it… basically, somehow.

But I have a massive problem with movies that waste their big potentials for nothing. Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is such a case. This movie has a story lurking in it with such epic quality that it’s not funny anymore.

Sorry when I start this review with a rant but when in the history of movies did someone decide that anything and everything even only slightly animated is being considered stuff for kids and families?

Just look at the reviews here, here and here: in every piece there’s a warning that Mary and Max is not for kids. Well, thank you very much for this warning. Please wake me up, if you started to watch some anime series and movies. Then we can talk. Seriously, this is embarrassing, especially when such assumptions come from reviewers. They should know better. (Or do they know better but write this because of some narrow-minded audience? Come one, nobody is that narrow-minded…)

In one point they are all correct, though: this is a truly adult story, heartwarming, poignant and bittersweet. The claymation Mary and Max is one of the best animated movies in recent memory and to me it beats Pixar’s Up by a landslide.

You see a face of a man in close-up, hard, rough, and roughly lit. Music stemming from a Spaghetti Western plays its dramatic tunes. The atmosphere is heavy. Then, the guy begins to eat a carrot. He’s sitting on a bench, nothing happens.

Seconds later a pregnant woman runs past him, pain shows in her face, she’s screaming…and a mobster is on her trails, screaming “You’re dead, bitch”. She runs into a building, the mobster’s right behind her, getting ready to shoot her. Our unnamed guy watches the whole scene in front of him. After both are out of sight he mumbles “Fuck it all” and goes after them.

Just before the mobster can kill the damsel in distress our unnamed guy closes in. He turns the bad guy around, puts his carrot into the open mouth of the mobster and smashes it right through the neck. His last advice? “Eat your vegetables”.

This, ladies and gentlemen, are the very first two minutes of Shoot ‘Em Up.

Gage recently added a comment to my review of Akira (the one anime that made anime famous as anime in the West) and this one made me think. He mainly writes about Kaori who is the girlfriend of Tetsuo i.e. the Guy Who Goes Horribly Nuts. Gage not only correctly points out that Kaori is only on screen in two scenes in Akira but also that in each segment Kaori is in a living hell and no one seems to care. I addressed his second point in a comment of mine in the original post, so I will use this space to address the first point: the role of Kaori in Akira since her two moments seem to be not that important at all.

Before I start please note that you need to have watched Akira at least once to understand what I’m writing about. If you didn’t, you can gladly skip this blog post if you like.

The actors, movies and production crews portrayed in this motion picture blog are fictitious. Any similarity to actors or persons or movies or production crews, fictitious or real, is entirely coincidental and unintentional.